William D. Ivancic, Phillip Paulsen, Dave Stewart, Wesley M. Eddy, James McKim, John Taylor, Scott Lynch, Jay Heberle, James Northam, Chris Jackson, Lloyd Wood. Large File Transfers from Space Using Multiple Ground Terminals and Delay-Tolerant Networking. In Proceedings of the Global Communications Conference, 2010. GLOBECOM 2010, 6-10 December 2010, Miami, Florida, USA. pages 1-6, IEEE, 2010. [doi]
We use Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) to break control loops between space-ground communication links and ground-ground communication links to increase overall file delivery efficiency, as well as to enable large files to be proactively fragmented and received across multiple ground stations. DTN proactive fragmentation and reactive fragmentation were demonstrated from the UK-DMC satellite using two independent ground stations. The files were reassembled at a bundle agent, located at Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio. The first space-based demonstration of this occurred on September 30 and October 1, 2009. This paper details those experiments.